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The findings mark the first time NASA scientists have confirmed by direct observation the presence of water on the Moon's surface.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has a vision for renewed and “sustainable” human exploration of the moon, and he cites the existence of water on the lunar surface as a key to chances for success.

“We know that there’s hundreds of billions of tons of water ice on the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine said in a Reuters TV interview in Washington on Tuesday, a day after NASA unveiled its analysis of data collected from lunar orbit by a spacecraft from India.

The findings, published on Monday, mark the first time scientists have confirmed by direct observation the presence of water on the moon’s surface – in hundreds of patches of ice deposited in the darkest and coldest reaches of its polar regions. The discovery holds tantalizing implications for efforts to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century. The presence of water offers a potentially valuable resource not only for drinking but for producing more rocket fuel and oxygen to breathe.

Bridenstine, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot and Oklahoma congressman tapped by President Donald Trump in April as NASA chief, spoke about “hundreds of billions of tons” of water ice that he said were now known to be available on the lunar surface. But much remains to be learned. NASA lunar scientist Sarah Noble told Reuters separately by phone that it is still unknown how much ice is actually present on the moon and how easy it would be to extract in sufficient quantities to be of practical use.

“We have lots of models that give us different answers. We can’t know how much water there is,” she said, adding that it will ultimately take surface exploration by robotic landers or rovers, in more than one place, to find out.

Most of the newly confirmed frozen water is concentrated in the shadows of craters at both poles, where the temperature never rises higher than minus-250 degrees Fahrenheit.

MAKING MOON EXPLORATION SUSTAINABLE

Although the moon was long believed to be entirely dry or nearly devoid of moisture, scientists have found increasing evidence in recent years that water exists there. A NASA rocket sent crashing into a permanently shadowed lunar crater near the moon’s south pole in 2009 kicked up a plume of material from beneath the surface that included water.

A study published the following year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that water is likely widespread within the moon’s rocky interior, in concentrations ranging from 64 parts per billion to five parts per million. Bridenstine spoke to Reuters about making the next generation of lunar exploration a “sustainable enterprise,” using rockets and other space vehicles that could be used again and again.

“So we want tugs that go from Earth orbit to lunar orbit to be reusable. We want a space station around the moon to be there for a very long period of time, and we want landers that go back and forth between the space station around the moon and the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine said.

NASA’s previous program of human moon exploration ended with the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Trump last December announced a goal of sending American astronauts back to the moon, with the ultimate goal of establishing “a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars.” The Trump administration’s $19.9 billion budget proposal for NASA for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 includes $10.5 billion for human space exploration.

The budget supports development of NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft designed to carry a crew into space. The administration envisioned a SLS/Orion test flight around the moon without a crew in 2020, followed by a fly-around mission with a crew in 2023. As part of the budget proposal, NASA also is planning to build the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway – a space station in moon orbit – in the 2020s. NASA said the power and propulsion unit, its initial component, is targeted to launch in 2022. In May, NASA canceled a lunar rover that was under development, a project envisioned as the first mission to conduct mining somewhere other than Earth.

People who struggle with their mental health are more likely to intensively use their smartphone as a form of therapy and that the less conscientious individuals are, the more likely they are to be addicted to their phones.

People who are less emotionally stable and suffer from anxiety and depression are more likely to be addicted to their smartphones, according to a research.

Emotional stability is characterised by being emotionally resilient. The study found that being less emotionally stable was associated with problematic smartphone behaviour.

People who struggle with their mental health are more likely to intensively use their smartphone as a form of therapy and that the less conscientious individuals are, the more likely they are to be addicted to their phones.

As levels of anxiety increase, problematic smartphone use also increases, the findings showed.

“Problematic smartphone use is more complex than previously thought and our research has highlighted the interplay of various

psychological factors in the study of smartphone use,” Zaheer Hussain, Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Derby in Britain, said in a statement.

“This is because people may be experiencing problems in their lives such as stress, anxiety, depression, family problems, so in that state they are emotionally unstable, meaning they may seek respite in very excessive smartphone use. This is worrying,” Hussain said.

For the study, a team of psychologists conducted an online study with 640 smartphone users, aged between 13-69 years, to find out the association between smartphone use and personality traits.

The results showed that people who are “closed off” or less open with their emotions are more likely to have problems with smartphone use.

“They may be engaging in passive social network use, where you spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, browsing other peoples’ comments, pictures, and posts, and not posting anything of your own and not engaging in discussion with others, so there is no real positive social interaction while social networking,” Hussain noted.

An amateur astronomer from Argentina captured a rare image: one of an exploding star.

Scientists have obtained the first view of the initial burst of light from the explosion of a massive star, thanks to lucky snapshots taken by an amateur astronomer in Argentina. While testing a new camera, Victor Buso captured images of a distant galaxy before and after the supernova’s ‘shock breakout’ – when a supersonic pressure wave from the exploding core of the star hits and heats gas at the star’s surface to a very high temperature, causing it to emit light and rapidly brighten.

To date, no one has been able to capture the ‘first optical light’ from a supernova, since stars explode seemingly at random in the sky, and the light from shock breakout is fleeting. The new data provide important clues to the physical structure of the star just before its catastrophic demise and to the nature of the explosion itself. “Professional astronomers have long been searching for such an event,” said Alex Filippenko, an astronomer at University of California, Berkeley in the US.

“Observations of stars in the first moments they begin exploding provide information that cannot be directly obtained in any other way,” said Filippenko, who followed up the discovery with observations that proved critical to a detailed analysis of explosion, called SN 2016gkg. On September 20, 2016, Buso was testing a new camera on his 16-inch telescope by taking a series of short-exposure photographs of the spiral galaxy NGC 613, which is about 80 million light years from Earth and located within the southern constellation Sculptor.

Luckily, he examined these images immediately and noticed a faint point of light quickly brightening near the end of a spiral arm that was not visible in his first set of images. Astronomer Melina Bersten and her colleagues at the Instituto de Astrofisica de La Plata in Argentina soon learned of the serendipitous discovery and realised that Buso had caught a rare event, part of the first hour after light emerges from a massive exploding star. She estimated Buso’s chances of such a discovery, his first supernova, at one in 10 million or perhaps even as low as one in 100 million.

“It’s like winning the cosmic lottery,” said Filippenko. Bersten immediately contacted an international group of astronomers to help conduct additional frequent observations of SN 2016gkg over the next two months, revealing more about the type of star that exploded and the nature of the explosion. Researchers estimated that the initial mass of the star was about 20 times the mass of our Sun, though it lost most of its mass, probably to a companion star, and slimmed down to about 5 solar masses prior to exploding.

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“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. Those who govern must see how the people react to administration. Ultimately, the people are the final arbiters”.
Lal Bahadur Shastri

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“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. Those who govern must see how the people react to administration. Ultimately, the people are the final arbiters”.
Lal Bahadur Shastri

News4

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“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. Those who govern must see how the people react to administration. Ultimately, the people are the final arbiters”.
Lal Bahadur Shastri

News4

News5

“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. Those who govern must see how the people react to administration. Ultimately, the people are the final arbiters”.
Lal Bahadur Shastri

News4

News5

“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. Those who govern must see how the people react to administration. Ultimately, the people are the final arbiters”.
Lal Bahadur Shastri

News4

News5

“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. Those who govern must see how the people react to administration. Ultimately, the people are the final arbiters”.
Lal Bahadur Shastri

News4

News5

“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. Those who govern must see how the people react to administration. Ultimately, the people are the final arbiters”.
Lal Bahadur Shastri

News4

News5

“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. Those who govern must see how the people react to administration. Ultimately, the people are the final arbiters”.
Lal Bahadur Shastri